Containment and purification of contaminated liquids has become a major environmental concern. For example, water passing through landfills often picks up contaminants before passing back into the surrounding earth. Such contaminated liquid enters the water table and can contaminate wells, streams, and rivers. Further, industrial pollution and more severely, industrial accidents, often pollute streams, rivers and other bodies of water. When such releases occur in flowing water, such as rivers, the contaminants often settle on the bottom of the waterbed, thereby continuing to contaminate water that passes into the ground from the body of water. More immediately, large environmental spills can greatly affect the ecology of a body of water and its surrounding environment.
To combat these issues, geotextiles have been developed which can help to filter out such contaminants and contain them. Often, these geotextiles are no more than nonwoven fabrics which can be laid within the bottom of a landfill before it is used or can be laid on the bed of a body of water. Others have tried to incorporate materials which can help remove the contaminants or absorb the contaminants for removal. For example, carbon-powder slurry-coated nonwovens have been used. These slurry-coated nonwovens are inexpensive and have low pressure drops. However, these nonwovens have relatively poor adsorption performance due to the small amount of carbon present, much of which is covered by adhesives.
Another example includes a high loft conglomeration of fibers which create spaces therebetween provided by AMCOL. During or after the laying of the fibers, adsorptive material can be added. These adsorptive materials are small enough to fit into the spaces between the fibers thereby helping to create a nonwoven sheet with adsorptive properties. However, while these adsorptive particles fill in the spaces between the fibers, they are not held in place. Therefore, the adsorptive particulates have a tendency to fall out or migrate during handling and use thereby being removed from the geotextile. Once the adsorptive particles start to dissipate from the nonwoven, an uneven distribution of adsorptive properties occurs within the geotextile. Therefore, as ground water or other liquids flow through the geotextile, it is very likely that removal of contaminants would not be optimized since the ground water or liquid would flow through different crevices or areas of the geotextile which have either a lessened amount or no adsorptive particles to aid in the removal of the contaminants.